New vs Vintage
"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 07:37:49 -0700, Ed Seedhouse wrote
(in article ):
On Mar 26, 10:10=A0am, Audio Empire wrote:
I was just somewhat surprised at how GOOD these old amps
actually were and thought I would share it with the group. Except for a
n=
ew
set of tubes and a couple of new filter caps in the power supply, and
cleaning the controls, these amps' signal paths were untouched.
snip
Actually, until quite recently, tube amps were all over the place. Some
sounded good by modern standards, some, not so good. These cheap little
Eicos
to which I referred sounded great, even through speakers that were,
clearly,
not a good match for them for a number of reasons (but mostly due to
efficiency). That is what surprised me the most.
And of course by the end of the 1960's solid state amplifiers that
were essentially sonically transparent were commonly available.
You mean Like the Dynaco ST-120 running hard into class 'B' with it's
VISIBLE
crossover notch? Or the Acoustech amplifier that went into supersonic
oscillation if you looked at it wrong, and created lots of odd-order
distortion when not blowing its output transistors? Or the early McIntosh
SS
deigns that used coupling transformers between stages and sounded
dreadful?
Or the early Crown SS power amps that sounded terrible (but in fairness,
were
essentially bulletproof. Something you couldn't say of the early Dynacos
or
the Harman-Kardon Citation 12, or any other 40-60 Watt/channel amps using
2N3055 output devices...).
Amen, brother, amen. Had experience (either by owning or helping friends)
with all of those. Any wonder I ended up with an ARC D90B?
These amplifiers did not put out much power it is true, and had
trouble driving the early and inefficient "acoustic suspension" system
that came
to popularity around then. I heard in the 1950's a system that,
though monophonic, would very likely meet the standard of "high
fidelity" even today. Of course records of the day were outclassed by
the CD systems that came later, but I remember listening to the
Shostakovatch fifth on my friend's Dad's monophonic system while I was
still in high school and being quite amazed at the sound quality even
back then from his kit built dynaco amps and preamps driving a
Wharfdale 9 cubic foot corner brick enclosure with a 15" woofer, 8"
midrange and 3" tweeter. That system was efficient for sure and the
30 or 40 watts from the Dynaco kit could drive it to extraordinary
levels and I had my first taste of real deep and un-boomy bass, not
repeated for many years except at live concerts.. Later that year I
heard our local symphony with an aunt supplying the tickets and was
surprised at how much like the orchestra in front of me sounded to
that old home built Wharfedale speaker.
We can do just as well today for what amounts to a lot less money when
you discount for inflation. But HI-Fi was invented in the 1940's and
could be amazingly good even with the old gigantic speakers that you
pretty well had to have to make things work.
snip
OTOH, I know an old guy (in his mid eighties) who has a pair of Altec
Lansing
speaker systems that have bass to die for. Each 50-inch by 65-inch by
30-inch
enclosure houses FOUR 15-inch Altec woofers (that's EIGHT altogether)!
I've
never heard a home stereo system pressurize a room like that system does.
The
bass not only goes subterranean, but it also can be felt like none I've
ever
heard outside of a concert hall. Unfortunately, the excellence of those
huge
speaker systems stops at 500 Hz where the simply HORRID Altec "treble
horns"
take over. I've known a number of people who had systems incorporating
these
terrible sounding devices. I've never heard them sound good on music (I
guess
they were OK in a movie theatre for speech intelligibility, but god help
them
for music).
I was lucky enough to have a dad who was in the business. So we had a big
mono JBL corner horn with two 15" woofers and a propriatary mid-range/treble
horn that sufficed up to about 15k. It did a pretty good job of sounding
"real" driven by a 25watt Newcomb power amp, especially on the audiophile
pressings of the day (I still recall the sound of the old Audiophile Label
12" red vinyl LP's featuring Red Nichols and the Five Pennies...."in the
room" sound. And then there were Emory Cook's "Sounds of Our Times"
recordings. One in particular, "Speed the Parting Guest" was a favorite in
our house. And of course the ubiquitous "Railroad Sounds". :/) ).
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